Six Highlights from Art of the Soviet Union

Launch Slideshow

This dedicated sale of Soviet-era art is being held in London on 28 November to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. It includes examples from the earliest years of the Soviet Union up until 1991, covering the avant-garde, state-sponsored Socialist Realism and unofficial art of the post-War period, and demonstrating the surprising diversity of the USSR’s artistic output. Led by a group of three works from the collection of Raymond and Susan Johnson, the highlight of the sale is Alexander Deineka’s large-scale Coal Miner. Click ahead to see this and more highlights.

Six Highlights from Art of the Soviet Union

Alexander Deineka, The Coal Miner, 1925 Estimate £3,500,000-4,500,000

The Coal Miner is one of the earliest and most important works by the artist to remain in private hands. It was originally part of a larger composition which the artist divided up shortly after it was exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Easel Painters (OST).The Coal Miner remained in the artist’s studio until the end of his life.

The Factory Party Meeting is the most important work by Georgy Rublev ever to appear at auction. All but forgotten before the first retrospective exhibition in Moscow in 1990, Rublev has been described as one of the last great discoveries in Russian art of the 1920s and 1930s.

A group of female engineering students, sporting red kerchiefs to symbolise their allegiance to socialism, are depicted on a study trip to the Baltic Shipyard. This work
was among those chosen to represent the Soviet Union at the Venice Biennale in 1932 and is the first major work by the artist to appear at auction.

Alexander Gerasimov, Herd on the Collective Farm/Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin, 1958-1959 Estimate £80,000-120,000

A version of Gerasimov’s iconic composition from 1938 depicting Stalin and Voroshilov was recently discovered under this scene of peasants and livestock painted in the late 1950s. Following the death of Stalin and Khruschev’s Secret Speech in 1956 portraits of the former leader were no longer in demand and ‘Stalin’s Velasquez’ had to recycle a previous composition to keep up with the changing ideology.

Spring is one of a group of six works to be offered in the Art of the Soviet Union sale with Gekkoso Gallery provenance. In the 1970s this Tokyo gallery held numerous exhibitions of the best examples of Russian and contemporary Soviet painting to promote the art of the Soviet Union in Japan.

Painted in 1991, the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bulatov’s work
addresses the conflict between ideology and reality, and the new reality then facing the country. The sale also includes a study for this work (Lot 322
).

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